On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I would like to welcome you to the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 2001(ASP-DAC 2001). This year's ASP-DAC will be held again in the Pacifico Yokohama, Japan, jointly with Electronic Design and Solution Fair 2001. The goal of the ASP-DAC is to provide an international forum for researchers and engineers in academia and industries, in the area of electronic system/VLSI design, and DA/CAD. ASP-DAC is a sister conference of DAC in the USA and DATE in Europe.

We have three excellent keynote speakers this year, who will talk about future directions of Electronics Industries and VLSI design technologies. Dr. Hajime Sasaki, Chairman of NEC Corporation, will give a talk on the role of Semiconductor Industry in the 21st Century. Dr. Ming-Jeh Chien, Chairman of First International Computer, Taiwan, will talk about Market and Technology in PC Products. Dr. Raul Camposano, Chief Technical Officer of Synopsys, USA, will talk on EDA Challenge to SOC solutions. I believe that these three distinguished talks will inspire the attendants to understand and predict the next generation VLSI design technologies.

This year, the Technical Program Committee, under the leadership of Prof. Hiroto Yasuura, Dr. Ravi Pai and Prof. Masaharu Imai reviewed 147 papers to select this year's outstanding Program. 90 papers are selected for their technical excellence, with an emphasis to bring new ideas, new subjects, improved methods and outstanding technical presentations to the Conference.

Papers selected have been organized into four trucks which cover the wide variety of hot topics from system design level to physical design. They also include special sessions such as panels, embedded tutorials. Among them, a special panel is scheduled just after the opening session on Wednesday and another truck consisting of special sessions is planned on Thursday.

A unique feature of ASP-DAC is the University LSI Design Contest, which focuses a real chip design in academia. 19 designs have been selected for poster presentation, from which 3 award winners will be announced at the conference.

On Tuesday, five full day tutorials are scheduled to give complete introductions of state-of-the-art design/CAD topics; (1)SpecC: Specification language and design methodology, (2)IP authoring and SOC integration, verification, and testing, (3)Software development methods for embedded systems, (4)Integrating logic synthesis and timing closure layout for DSM, (5)Design issues regarding wire-line/wireless network chip implementation.

Recent IT revolution is now facing tremendous challenges caused by accelerated scaling down and ever increasing complexity of System-on-Chip. I believe the ASP-DAC 2001 will be a precious opportunity for you to find valuable information by exchanging ideas with CAD researchers, CAD developers, and VLSI designers.

I hope you will have a valuable and enjoyable experience at Yokohama, Japan, in next January.

General Chair, ASP-DAC 2001